Early and seminal art critic of the New York School of painting,
particularly for the work of Jackson Pollock. Greenberg's
parents were Joseph Greenberg (1884-1977) and Dora Brodwin (Greenberg)
(1888-1925), Russian immigrants who successfully operated clothing stores,
factories and real estate in the Bronx, NY.
He grew up in the Bronx except for the period 1914-1915 when the family lived in Norfolk, VA. In later years, his parents would be
the model for what Greenberg saw as philistine American attitudes toward art. After briefly
studying art at the Art
Students League in New York City in 1925, he entered Syracuse University after his
mother's early death, graduating with a B.A. in literature in 1930.
The Depression now in its height, Greenberg worked for clothing stores owned by
this father in St. Louis. He taught himself German, which led to a job translating German
books. He moved to California to manage stores there. There he met a wealthy 26-year-old divorcee
named Edwina "Toady" Ewing (b.1908) whom he married in 1934 in San Francisco.
Greenberg joined the U.S.
Customs Service in New York and divorced Ewing, both in 1936. He dabbled in
writing cultural criticism around 1937, embracing a Marxist approach,
and contributing essays to the Partisan Review, the mouthpiece for a
group known as the New York Intellectuals. At Lee Krasner's suggestion,
he attended the lectures of Hans Hofmann, the German ex-patriot artist
responsible for forming the thought of many of the future Abstract
Expressionists. An early article on criticism
in the magazine,
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in 1939 demonstrated an interest in social
conditions for creating the art. The following year he became editor of the
Partisan Review. Greenberg contributed a regular column on art for the Nation
beginning in 1942
(though 1949). He was the foremost spokesperson for modernism during the
war years. His art theory was drawn almost exclusively from Hans
Hofmann's notion of the dissolution of subject. As such, he attacked art
movements containing subject matter, such as
Surrealism (Nation, 1942), as reversing the trend of abstraction.
Other artists receiving his animadversion during the 1940's included Mondrian
and Kandinsky. In 1942, Krasner introduced Greenberg to Jackson Pollock,
her future husband, and Greenberg thereafter championed the artist's career. Greenberg joined the Army Air Force at the height of World
War II in 1943, but was discharged for psychological reasons, and resumed editing and
writing. He entered a year affair with the writer Mary McCarthy
(1912-1989). He joined the journal Commentary as associate editor
in 1945 (through 1957).
Greenberg published a book on Joan Miró in 1948. Around this time, he changed his approach
to art criticism, abandoning Trotskyite aesthetics for Kantian (formal) criteria for art.
He championed the Abstract Expressionist artists, whom
he helped publicize through exhibitions he mounted largely for the Kootz Gallery,
under the direction of Samuel Kootz,
in New York. The first of these was the show, co-curated with Columbia art
historian Meyer Schapiro, "Talent" in 1950, featuring Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan,
Franz Kline, Alfred Leslie, and Larry Rivers. Greenberg taught at Black
Mountain College, the progressive North Carolina arts school in 1950, delivering
lectures on "The Development of Modernist Painting and Sculpture from Their
Origins to the Present Time." His esthetics deeply affected, among other
students, the artist Kenneth Noland. The same year, 1950, he met the painter Helen Frankenthaler and the two lived together for
a number of years. A 1952 show on Pollock at Bennington College was the
first of a number of shows curated by Greenberg at that college venue. Greenberg, through the journal Artforum, became major vehicle advancing Abstract Expressionism; his authority as a tastemaker, according to the art historian Robert Rosenblum, was "papal" (Newman). Greenberg published a monograph on Matisse
in 1953. A show "Emerging Talent" at the Kootz Gallery, featuring
Morris Louis,
Noland, and Philip Perlstein, was mounted in 1954. He delivered
the
Ryerson Lecture at Yale University in 1954, "Abstract and Representational."
Another seminal article, "'American Type'
Painting," appeared in 1955. Greenberg married Janice Elaine Van Horne
in 1956. He formally advised the New York art gallery French and Company between
1958 and 1960. In 1958, too, he delivered the Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism at
Princeton. His next art history book, on Hans Hofmann, appeared in 1961, along
with Art and Culture, his collected criticism. Greenberg's insistence on esthetic standards--rigid categories into which movements like Pop Art and minimalism did not fit, began to estrange him from his public. When it became clear his pronouncements against these art styles was being ignored, he tapered
off writing in the early 1960's. He taught at
Bennington College in 1962 (and again in 1971),
curated a show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964 organized
around his term "Post Painterly Abstraction." By the late 1960's, however, Greenberg's formalistic-approach to
painting, his evaluative art criticism--not to mention his acerbic style and his distain of newer art forms--increasingly alienated him from the mainstream art world. Art
history was adopting a pluralism of art trends and an
avoidance of the concept of "style" which Greenberg could not
relinquish. His
writing was attacked as myopic and elitist. In 1977 and 1980 he served as the executor for the estates of Bush and Smith,
executing his duties again controversially.
Greenberg died in New York in 1994 from complications of emphysema. A major conference on his writing was held
in New York the following year. He never completed a monograph on his primary interest, Jackson Pollock. His papers are held at the Archives of American Art and the
Getty Research Center.

Greenberg's formalism (so associated with his writing that it is sometimes
referred to as "Greenbergian Formalism") was a blend of his reading of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Hofmann’s theories of
painting, the writing of the 19th-century esthete Walter Pater and the work of the British Bloomsbury formalist Roger Fry. Greenberg argued that esthetic judgments are intuitive ("involuntary") and
irrational since they cannot be proven (Complaints of an Art Critic, 1967).
His fellow art critic Barbara Rose quipped that Greenberg had trouble
finding artists exceptional enough to bear the mantle he bestowed. He emphasized
that Abstract Expressionism's flat,
two-dimensional quality was the movement's
importance to art history. Modern painting, Greenberg asserted, was evolving toward ridding itself of Renaissance
pictorial illusion, adding that the
public's initial revulsion toward Abstract Expressionist art of the 1940's was a
"symptom of cultural and even moral decay."
By likening this work to the old masters, Greenberg argued it was equal to the best European modern art.
Anathema to his theory was art with narrative content, which came under his
particular derision. Pop art, and that of Roy Lichtenstein in particular, was
disparaged by him. Greenberg was fond of employing vague terminology such as "viable essence"
to describe the artists whom he appreciated. In addition to promoting the art of William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell,
Barnett Newman, and Pollock, he created the term "Post
Painterly Abstractionists" to characterize and define the Color-field style
of Helen Frankenthaler,
Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitiski. His criticism was so
powerful, some artists (Noland for example) actually admitted changing their
directions to fit Greenberg's approval. A newer generation of art
historians, such as T. J. Clark, Michael Fried, and Rosalind
Krauss incorporated elements of Greenberg's approach into their own methodology.
His writing was lampooned, though not very insightfully, by Tom Wolfe (b. 1930) in his book
The Painted Word (1975).